Hacker News Reader

Comment by ecaron | Hacker News Reader

It is amazing how many in this community are able to just dismiss this "Oh yeh, boot2docker performance is still awful." If Docker was a product by Google or Microsoft, we'd have pitch forks out by this point. Yet somehow Docker is still able to skate by on having incredibly subpar Mac OS X performance.

"How Docker Got The Apple Community To Love It, Despite Horrible Performance" <- will someone please write that post, since that's what I really want to know.

View on HN

If I understand correctly, Docker's performance on OS X is a function of running in a Linux virtual machine, because Docker requires Linux. Is there something about Docker that you feel like inhibits performance beyond the VM itself?

One area of possible improvement is that boot2docker's default mechanism for sharing volumes with the mac is virtualbox guest additions, which are notoriously slow. As for performance, to my knowledge it's simply a matter of the underlying vm config.

tldr: boot2docker should expose ways to leverage faster vm configurations.

I'd love for it to work over NFS. It should be easily doable, but I guess it means adding another dependency to the boot2docker ISO.

We're mostly looking at supporting remote volume sync in docker itself, with a pluggable transport - could be smb, nfs, periodic rsync, sftp... bradfitz started an awesome contribution with a full remote-fuse-protocol sync :) pretty awesome but we haven't been able to merge it yet because the volume system needs to be made sufficiently clean and modular first.

The advantage of doing it in Docker proper is that it works in all distros without outside dependencies, instead of just boot2docker.

Note: we are looking for help on this, if you feel willing and able. Even better if you can invest some recurring time to maintain and help others contribute.

It really has been one of the worst parts of deploying Docker in development actually. I would have gone into more depth on that but every error feels like a personal suffering. We have quite a few developers and many are off site and have odd hardware. You'd think a VM would hide this but integrating with VirtualBox has an ongoing an non trivial internal support cost for us.

I gave up on boot2docker, and just use an Ubuntu image with docker as my virtual dev environment.

Even with sub-par performance in development, that doesn't mean it's the same in production... your local desktop isn't going to run a full database instance with equal throughput to the dedicated cluster of servers either, so we should all abandon cassandra (or whatever) too?

Do you run OSX in production?

No, 99% of our devs run Macbooks

Reply on news.ycombinator.com